Panel Faults Cia Effort

Report Expected To Blast Agency On Arms Information

July 6, 2004|By James Risen The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The CIA was told by relatives of Iraqi scientists before the war that Baghdad's programs to develop unconventional weapons had been abandoned, but the CIA failed to give that information to President Bush, even as he publicly warned of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons, according to government officials.

The existence of a secret prewar CIA operation to debrief relatives of Iraqi scientists, and the agency's failure to give their statements to the president and other policymakers, has been uncovered by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The panel has been investigating the government's handling of prewar intelligence on Iraq's unconventional weapons and plans to release a wide-ranging report this week on the first phase of its inquiry. The report is expected to contain a scathing indictment of the CIA and its leaders for failing to recognize that the evidence they had collected did not justify their assessment that Hussein had illicit weapons.

CIA officials, saying that only a few relatives made claims that the weapons programs were dead, play down the significance of the information collected in the secret debriefing operation. That operation is one of a number of significant disclosures by the Senate investigation.

The Senate report, intelligence officials say, concludes that the agency and the rest of the intelligence community did a poor job of collecting information about the status of Iraq's weapons programs, and that analysts at the CIA and other intelligence agencies did an even worse job of writing reports that accurately reflected the information they had.

Among the many problems that contributed to the committee's harsh assessment of the CIA's prewar performance were instances in which analysts may have misrepresented information, writing reports that distorted evidence in order to bolster their case that Iraq did have chemical, biological and nuclear programs, according to government officials. The Senate found, for example, that an Iraqi defector who supposedly provided evidence of the existence of a biological weapons program actually had said that he did not know of any such program.

In another case concerning whether a shipment of aluminum tubes seized on its way to Iraq was evidence that Baghdad was trying to build a nuclear bomb, the Senate panel raised questions about whether the CIA had become an advocate, rather than an objective observer, and selectively sought to prove that the tubes were for a nuclear weapons program.

While the Senate panel has concluded that CIA analysts and other intelligence officials overstated the case that Iraq had illicit weapons, the committee has not found any evidence that the analysts changed their reports as a result of political pressure from the White House, according to officials familiar with the report.

The Senate report is expected to criticize both the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, and his deputy, John McLaughlin, and other senior CIA officials, for the way they managed the agency before the war. Tenet has announced his resignation, effective July 11, and McLaughlin will serve as acting director until a permanent director is appointed. The CIA has scheduled a farewell ceremony at its headquarters for Tenet on Thursday, just as the reverberations from the Senate report are likely to be hitting the agency.

The possibility that Tenet personally overstated the evidence has been investigated by the Senate panel, officials said. He was interviewed privately by the panel recently, and was asked whether he told Bush that the case for the existence of Iraq's unconventional weapons was a "slam dunk."

In his book about the Bush administration's planning for the war in Iraq titled Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward reported that Tenet reassured Bush about the evidence of the existence of Iraq's illicit weapons after Bush had made clear he was unimpressed by the evidence presented to him in a December 2002 briefing by McLaughlin.

"It's a slam-dunk case!" Tenet is quoted as telling the president.

In his private interview with the Senate panel, Tenet refused to say whether he had used the "slam-dunk" phrase, arguing that his conversations with the president were privileged, officials said.

In hindsight, the Senate panel and many other intelligence officials now agree that there was little effort within the U.S. intelligence community before the war to question the basic assumption that Hussein was still seeking to produce illicit weapons.

Evidence that fit that assumption was embraced; evidence to the contrary was ignored or seen as part of a clever Iraqi disinformation campaign.